Thus Spaketh Idd Salim

Dem speaketh from dem azzes

They say, you can take a rabid Dog to Lodwar, but once it gets fare to Nairobi, it will return as just a tanned rabid dog. Nothing More. And the tan disappears. And then it goes back to it’s rabid ways – Chapa-nese Saying.

The big question, when it comes to online content and freedoms, remains : how do we handle the e-smearers and gutter-press? The perpetual/full-time ones and the seasonal ones (e.g. Next year because of elections).

It is a sad state on the net. I have talked about this before, but I will expound on it a bit, sharing the content’s of today’s meeting. There are over 30, 000 bloggers in Kenya. Yes. It is so easy nowadays that any idiot with a spare KSSH 1000 can open a .com blog in 13 minutes flat. For the broke types, all it takes now is a .ning or a .blogspot domain and BAM!! You have online presence.

But let us get a little analytic. Let us discuss the problem, then possible solutions.

Do a quick google search for any mover or shaker in their space. You will find gutter-press, or as we call them, ‘name-squaraders’ who use these names to drive traffic to their pitiful sites with the hope that GoogleAds will score them some coins. Yours truly has also not been spared.

These people are the online equivalent of muggers. They masquarade as writers and steal your time and intelligence from you, as their readers.

Anything will be smeared. Even KenyansForKenya campaign was smeared. The effort. Leave alone the aftermath.

Election is coming next year and it is sad that among us are 10-dollar hoes and sons of 2-dollar hoes that will get paid by some politicians to spread hate in their anonymous blogs. According to the politicians, these are the voices of youth in Kenya. To the rest of us who have a brain, these are debris at the bottom of the food-chain.

So, we cannot ignore the problem. We can only think of possible solutions.

Possible solutions

Well, there is always the Colombian solution of lead. But then again, being civilized people, we don’t want to make a martyr off a online pest, and so, the need for civilized solutions come.

1 – Legal Solution

The new constitution accords us freedom of speech and expression. It also protects every citizen from defamation, character assassination and false-ful representation. That means, you cannot just wake up one morning, and because hujadishi siku tatu, you write what you feel about someone you wish you were. If you can not get the e-pests to pull down the blog-post, legal systems are here to help. More on this soon.

2 – Positive Content

If for every negative content, there are 9 positive ones on a subject, the weighted mean and the indexing on Google etc would suffocate and lower the rankings of the the negative articles.

3 – Censorship

The KIXP and the ISPs would be great players here. We could easily create a vetting system and if a blog or a blog-post hits a negative sentiment threshold of 30%, it could be blocked, perpetually from an ISP level.

4 – Google Blocking

The Google team (Not referring to Google Kenya here) [see google site for removal] has always expressed willingness to remove from its indexes such content. The domain could be blocked from search indexes, too.

5 – Hacking

Most of the blogs are (duh!) on the web and so, this could be a good option. Last option. Bring down the service. For the broke ones who use .ning and .blogspot, this brings a big challenge. You would not be targeting a WHOLE setup (ning or blogspot), not just a pesky blog. Based on terms and conditions on the service, the service could be contacted and if they fail to bring down the blog, we would use ISP-level censorship to block the domain.

Those are my 3 cents.

Back to code.

Wazi!